The days of boring, sales-led messages are over. Enter the era of storytelling as a marketing technique
People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” These were the words uttered by Simon Sinek at TED in 2009, and they are the words that sum up precisely why brand storytelling is such a great marketing skill today.
The digital revolution of the past decade has completely changed the way in which marketers approach and engage with their audiences. Customers these days are bombarded daily with thousands of brand messages from a variety of sources – be it social networks, mobile devices, digital outdoor screens – the list goes on. There isn’t possibly time to process all of these, and most are automatically filtered straight out. At the same time – and this is a point especially true of B2B buyers – customers can turn to the internet to find what they are looking for, rather than wait for a supplier to get their message to them.
For the past few years it has not been enough for a brand to simply say, “we’re the best, buy into us.” Such is the choice available, and the ease of access to it, that customers need much more convincing reasons to buy into a brand. Enter the age of storytelling.
“Brand storytelling is the ability to connect the hearts and minds of every employee, partner, supplier and customer to a shared belief, to why the organisation does what it does,” says Chris Miller, head of brand and engagement at B2B communications agency Ditto. To paraphrase Sinek again, every organisation on the planet knows what they do. But very few know why they do it – what their purpose is and their cause.
“Storytelling has been around for a long time, however over the last few years it has been used more frequently in marketing communications,” continues Miller. “Good storytellers understand the importance of shifting the focus away from the brand itself to focus instead on the customers, business partners, employees and friends. The brand storyteller needs to focus on finding and uncovering customers’, business partners’, employees’ and friends’ stories and bringing them into focus for everyone else to share. With each story shared so is the personality of the brand.”
Miller cites Boeing as a good example of a brand that understands the power of storytelling. “Its site reads like a news story and not a sales pitch and its videos on YouTube are factual and informative yet entertaining, all of which support the Boeing brand,” he says.
Traditional stories
So we’ve identified storytelling as a marketing concept, but what are some of its key components? According to Chris Hewitt, CEO of Berkeley PR, there are three – bad news, human interest and topicality – while the structure of storytelling in marketing can be influenced by the nursery rhymes we learned back in childhood.
“Let’s start with bad news. Clearly we won’t keep our clients very long if we start writing bad news about them. But there is a way to ignite interest in what they are doing above and beyond the usual self-congratulating puff about new products, contract wins and strategic partnership agreements,” he says. Every invention ever created was designed to solve a problem. In fact, if it doesn’t solve a problem, no-one will buy it. So we encourage our clients to look at their product or service from a problem-solving perspective – then we build a drama around the problem itself rather than the product or service.
“There must also be a human interest element to every story; people bring a story to life. So again, taking the problem our client solves, we weave in a human interest angle ideally using the experience of an individual or group of people. Topicality is the third ingredient, which is where we try and tie the story in to something trending at the time.
Hewitt concludes, “By far the biggest stories are the ones that bring all three components together. If you think about it, bad news, human interest and topicality combine to form many of the nursery rhymes we tell our children. There’s danger, there’s a baddy (or a hero) and there’s relevancy – whether we are teaching our children to cross the road safely or not take sweets from strangers.” This is a formula then that our brains can process and that we are already familiar with.
Content reigns
We have our components now, but how does a brand go about actually telling a compelling story? The journey begins with the creation of good content.
“Content marketing and storytelling have a symbiotic relationship – one informs the other. Without good content, there is no story to tell and without a bit of storytelling, content marketing can be dry and tired,” says Clare Granville, senior account manager at PR agency Man Bites Dog. A good practical example of this point lies in a current campaign being run by storage company, Iron Mountain. The core message of the campaign focuses on the importance of information responsibility.
Hewitt is a fan of the brand’s approach, which has seen it gain a wealth of rich media exposure. “Using research commissioned from PWC, content was created that enabled Iron Mountain to tell a compelling story about how mid-market businesses are missing the plot when it comes to safeguarding the information they hold,” he explains. “While many businesses build expensive digital fortresses around their IT, little seems to protect them from employees leaving the office with hard copies of confidential and sensitive information. This problem, Iron Mountain proved, is widespread throughout Europe. The company told the story using research, then engaged leading industry thinking and academics from European business schools to debate the findings, which itself led to more scenarios and opportunities to tell compelling stories.”
The result was more than 150 pieces of editorial that reached an estimated 13 million people. Coverage appeared in The Economist, Bloomberg and the Financial Times to name just a few.
Employee engagement
Storytelling in marketing isn’t just about getting customers onboard with your ethos, it is just as important to engage with your employers so they also feel part of the story. Every brand has a history that can be drawn on – the way in which the company was formed, the background of the founding partners, its purpose, personality and ethos. It is important to communicate information about all of this to employees so that they can share the company vision and project it outwards. “By harnessing the power of storytelling, brands can connect people (employees and customers) to the journey, so they align behind it and contribute towards it. The result is a deep and lasting engagement. Brand storytelling is the ability to connect the hearts and minds of every employee, partner, supplier and customer to a shared belief” says Miller.
Walk into any Apple store and its army of retail employees are undeniably enthusiastic ambassadors of the brand, which is because they believe in the brand ethos. In fact, according to Sinek in his TED speech, Apple is a shining example of a brand that has got storytelling – when it comes to its core message – down to a T.
“If Apple was like everyone else, a marketing message from it might sound something like this – ‘We make great products. They’re beautifully designed, simple-to-use and user-friendly. Want to buy one?’ [But instead] here is how Apple communicates – ‘In everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differentially. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple-to-use and user-friendly – we just happen to make great products – want to buy one?’” Reversing the order of the information, argues Sinek, proves that people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And the ‘why’ is the point that can be communicated via inspired storytelling.
Be creative
The dawn of social media is aiding the popularity of storytelling in marketing and in the B2C world, there is evidence brands are starting to hand their stories over to customers, allowing them to add to messages by contributing and creating content. In B2B, this isn’t as straightforward an action – you don’t tend to stumble across brand fanatics willing to do this quite so easily. But this, argues Andy O’Brien, creative director at digital marketing agency Amaze, means B2B brands just have to employ some more creative thinking.
“[The] online [environment] can provide a wealth of tools and collaborative spaces that help B2B clients actually conduct business, be better at their jobs and make their professional lives easier,” he says.
“Although this might not be an obvious ‘story’, it is a demonstration of living the brand and so it is a demonstration of the brand’s story. Stories can be evidenced through behaviour, as well as the more traditional ‘once upon a time’ explanation.
“Good story-telling gives brands a reason to talk (and not simply find more clever ways of saying the same thing) and it’s good to talk,” O’Brien adds. “It provides an opportunity to get in front of your target customers. It is also vital in ‘the long conversation’.”
The human touch
Perhaps the most important point to remember when it comes to storytelling in marketing is that the stories you create should humanise your brand. “Storytelling can give brands the opportunity to be more than an information sheet, expressing their DNA. We’re all more likely to engage with someone once we know their story,” says Miller.
“The key to success in storytelling is underpinning it with strong, original hypotheses that are evidenced by robust data. It’s important to not only tell a story, but to tell it in an engaging way,” adds Granville. “One way to ensure sales alignment is to ‘flip’ your sales proposition into the problems you solve and weave a narrative around this. Examine the impact these problems have on your targets’ businesses, the scale of the problems and the consequences for your audience, their sector, and for the UK economy at large of failing to
address them.”
At the end of the day, wouldn’t we all rather work with those who share our ethos and vision of the world? “We’re all more likely to engage with someone once we know their story,” concludes Miller.
Believe in what you do
Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why, outlines how self-belief builds the foundation of a good brand story
If you don’t know why you do what you do, then how will you ever get people to vote for you, or buy something from you, or, more importantly, be loyal and want to be a part of what it is that you do? The goal is not just to sell to people who need what you have; the goal is to sell to people who believe what you believe. The goal is not just to hire people who need a job; it’s to hire people who believe what you believe. I always say that, you know, if you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money, but if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood, sweat
and tears.
